[ad_1]
A lot of weird and wonderful things happened at this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed, but one of them caught everyone's attention a little bit more than from others: the Ford Mustang from Siemens. Although it 's one of 1965' s classic Stang on the outside, it 's an autonomous car. And if the social media reaction after its first climb up the hill was something to do, it's not a particularly good self-driving car.
He snuck out. He skimmed the grass. At one point, he was pushed into a hay bale, before his driver brought it back to the straight and (very) narrow line. Yes, there was always an engineer behind the wheel, just in case. Good job, it seems.
Throughout this time, Roborace's self-driving car climbed the coast at an apparent rate twice as fast and with 100% fewer pilots on board. I watched him graze Goodwood House just minutes before heading to the Mustang, his online review that was buzzing in my head.
It was not as scary as one might have thought, 20 mph limit undoubtedly helping. But it was far from the finesse and wow factor of Roboracer. While the Siemens Mustang was deploying a lot of technology, it was largely based on a GPS map of the hill that had been programmed into his brain. There was no live "reading" of the circuit to make ad hoc decisions
We immediately ran into problems because the long walk through the waiting area has us left too long under the trees. The sensors of the car lost their signal and we had to wait in a clearing because it has sufficiently returned to the hill, a moment quite similar to that of strolling outside the pub to gather enough telephone signals to send a text message to your companion. It was the same clarification that – a few seconds earlier – the 2018 Bullitt Mustang had the habit of making a huge donut, warming its tires for the coast run ahead. Mustang entirely different, this.
With enough signal on board, we moved away cleanly and confidently, and the car maneuvered quite gently. At least to begin. However, once we arrived in front of the house, she snuck up as in all the clips you saw. It's intentional, the engineers told us, so that viewers could see the car heading itself, which would not be seen in a straight line. Oh, and this hay bale incident of his initial was a mechanical fault of direction.
Even with these claims in mind, the use of the throttle was not particularly sweet, betraying the issue of basing your autonomous car on something as old as this. Even at their peak, Mustangs have never been models of urgency or gas acuteness, and try to connect electronic systems that rely on millimetric precision to a 53-year-old example. It was never going to be an easy choice
How much work Cranfield University, who worked with Siemens on the project, had to do. And how they did it by making it functional. That the Mustang has made the entire race uneventfully on our course (the video above) is worth applause, and you really can not be brave in showing a student project after hours. like that in front of such a large audience. An enthusiastic audience who probably does not expect to accept autonomous cars with open arms, do not forget.
This sounds a little naive, especially when the Roboracer did a better job of making autonomy easy to swallow – and potentially quite exciting – an hour before we went up the hill. Our ride in Siemens Mustang was not scary, but it was not particularly revolutionary. Shame.
Source link
